Bargello & Twisted Alcohol Background

We're doing a Book Study as a group on NGS, using Nancy Curry's book "Texture Effects for Rubber Stamping". This week we are doing the Bargello design. I thought it would be fun to combine the Bargello design with one of the extra Twisted Alcohol Backgrounds I made earlier this week. I stamped a flourish design with Watermark ink over the twisted alcohol backgrounds and heat set.

I made my own "blending pad tool". I cut a piece of Cut-N-Dry and temporarily adhered it to an acrylic block that had Tack N Peel attached to it (I normally use this with unmounted rubber).

I used this "blending pad tool" to add light blue Distress ink over the image to reveal the stamped image. I used the blending tool to add in some darker blue Distress inks.

I over stamped the same flourish with the darkest blue Distress ink and heat set. Next, added some metallic silver mixture by splattering it on with a toothbrush.

To create the Bargello element, I cut this background into long strips about 1/8" - 1/4" in width and adhered them to a shorter piece of card stock while varying the placement of the strips.

I stamped a bird image with Archival ink, covered with black embossing powder and heat set.

It needed more metallic silver splatters, so applied more with the splatter toothbrush method again.

I ran a piece of card stock that was blue on one side and white on the other through a snowflake Cuttlebug embossing folder and sanded down the raised areas to reveal some white. I later ran a silver leafing pen around the outside edges.

I layered the bargello element onto the embossed snowflake piece and layered that onto a blue card. I added a snowflake punched out of silver paper and a metal tag with black brads on a metallic silver ribbon.